Anthropology of an American Girl (48 page)

He nodded; I did too. I wondered was Chet short for Chester. “Florida is hot,” I said.

“Not hot enough for me,” he stated, averting his eyes as he drove a heap of powder to the center of a plate and began to chop. The muscle beneath his right eye shuddered. Chet nudged the results in my direction.

“Oh,” I said, “no thanks.” I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, so I came closer, kneeling on the floor.

His eyes met mine; he wore thick glasses. “Go ahead. It’s okay.”

“No, I just—I feel a little—dizzy, I guess.”

Biff quickly took up the plate in my place. He said, “That’s too bad.”

Two of the other guys, one still in a muddy rugby shirt, were talking about weather—forecasters, maps, advancements in accuracy. Somehow this led to a heated disquisition on world wars and political scandals, with Biff joining in. I wondered how they could sit still even though they were so high. You must just hit a critical point of intoxication, a mortal sort of limit, and your body goes into shock, becoming indisposed to motion. I waited until they had done another round before I stood to leave, which was on my part an excruciating gesture of propriety.

“Taking off?” Chet said.

“Yeah, I guess. Nice to meet you, though. Good luck in Florida.”

“Come on back,” Chet said. “We’ll be here.”

On my way out, I heard a voice say, “Harrison Rourke.”

Rourke hadn’t moved from where I’d left him; he was still in the kitchen, leaning on the counter, holding two beers. No one seemed to notice that he was disconnected from everything about him, that his smile was a lie, that he hated Heineken. No one noticed his eyes furiously fixed on the door I’d just exited. Rob would have seen, but Rob wasn’t there. Maybe it was because he was mad, but he looked sexier than ever. His eyes were narrow, impervious as marbles, tilted slightly down at the outer rims. The tousled heaviness of his hair, the conceited set to his jaw, the form beneath the clothes. I thought of how lucky I’d been to fuck him, how vicious would be my physical loss. I became conscious of my breasts, of their desirability. I wanted his hands on them, his mouth. He beheld me stiffly, inertly, as if staring at a compelling design on the wall. I moved on.

I passed through a set of sliding doors onto a deteriorating deck that faced a wall of scrubby adolescent oaks. There was a dented sweating keg surrounded by bodies. To the right were voices. To the left, past a cluster of taken chairs, an empty stretch of rail. I went over and looked down. It was a short drop to the ground. It was not impossible to jump and run—Springs Fireplace was the nearest road, but then I might never see him again. If I waited, at least I would see him again. I considered going back to Biff and Chet, but it would not have been good. It wasn’t worth making Rourke upset.

After Rob and I had finished eating at Surfside on the night of Rob’s birthday, Val and Rob and I took another stroll out back to the walk-in. The kitchen staff just glanced up as we passed, then went casually back to work. They seemed accustomed to people cutting through. Once inside the cooler, Val removed from his silk shirt pocket a brown glass vial with a baby spoon attached by chain. He stuffed the spoon full and offered it to me.

“No thanks, man,” Rob said. “I’ve been off that stuff for a while. And, as for her, she stays clean.”

“Jesus,” Val said. “No liquor, no coke. What kind of asshole is this boyfriend, anyway?”

“Not the kind you want to swap punches with,” Rob said, adding, “He fights.”

“So what? Everybody fights. What do you mean
fights?”

“Fights, fights, you know,
bing, bing,”
Rob jabbed at a gigantic mayonnaise jar on a shelf. “He’s a light heavyweight. One seventy-eight,” Rob said. “Exact.”
Eggzact
.

“Professional?”

“Amateur so far. This past winter would have been his first Olympics.”

“Oh, shit,” Val said. “Then the U.S. boycott happened. What’s he gonna do now?”

“He’ll turn, probably. Maybe. We’ll see. He has offers.”

“More money to be made in professional.”

“There’s money to be made in everything,” Rob said. “If you know what I mean.”

Later that same night we were lying in bed, Rourke and me; around us things were strangely quiet. The lupine night came through the windows, haggard, sinuous, haunting, hunting.

I asked him, “Do you fight?”

He did not seem surprised by the question. He said yes.

“Is that why you have scars?” He had several.

He pointed to his chest above his heart. There was a three-inch line. “That I got when I was fourteen. In a fight over my father. After he died.” He pointed to his left arm. “This one on my arm like a star is from a dog. A pit bull. See, it puckers.”

“This one?” It was on his thigh. I touched it.

“You don’t want to know about this one.”

“How come you don’t do drugs?”

He breathed out thoughtfully. “Because they involve debts to people not worth repaying. Because they show up in blood and urine. Because they destroy the body and the character.” He yanked me higher up on the flat of his chest by the swell of my ass. He aligned us, naturally, perfectly. In an undertone he added, “Because I don’t like to paralyze myself.”

“What did you win? Prizes?”

“Prizes, sure,” he told me. “And bets.”

——

Someone grabbed my shoulders. It was Mark Ross. He was behind me on the deck, bending to kiss me. The beginnings of a beard sprouted from his chin. I reached to touch his face. “How
are
you?” he inquired with diligent concern, as though I’d survived an ordeal, which possibly I had.

I didn’t bother to ask what he was doing down there in Springs at a rugby party, since somehow I’d ended up there too. He must have guessed my thoughts. He slipped a hand into his khakis and said, “I’m here with Tommy. Tommy Lydell. He’s out for the weekend.”

“The big guy?” I asked. “From Jersey?”

“That’s right.”

I didn’t understand how Mark would have known him. “Did he go to college with you guys too?”

“Tommy? I doubt he made it past the eighth grade. I met him at UCLA several times. He would visit us, mostly for fights. We kept in touch. He’s actually staying at my house tonight with his girlfriend and her sister.”

I had the feeling there were things he was leaving out. Rourke and Rob had left them out too.

“You should get out of here,” Mark said. “This isn’t the place for you.”

“I’ve seen worse.”

“Trust me. You haven’t. The night is young.”

I stepped away, and he followed, closing in on me, parting a fan of leaves above my head that was obstructing his view. When they flopped back, he snapped off the shoot, twisting it crudely, throwing the piece down. I looked at it on the deck, uncurling slightly, as if in a final sigh. I leaned on the rail. Mark leaned as well, his forearm skimming mine. The stars were far—I pointed.

“Look how far they are,” I said. “September’s coming.”

“No, Eveline,” Mark said. “September’s here.”

At the driver’s door, Rourke paused. “Mind driving?”

I knew he hadn’t been drinking. Anyway, I said sure. When we changed places, our bodies brushed at the front of the car, which was
unsettling. Behind the wheel, the view was his view; this was also unsettling.

“Ever driven standard?” he asked.

I pressed back into the seat to stop shivering. “No.”

“Take the stick.” He covered my hand with his own and jiggled it. “This is neutral. Now turn the key.”

I started the engine, and the car came alive. Though I’d often heard talk of the car’s specifications—a 400 cubic V-8 engine with 335 horsepower and a 4-barrel Rochester carb—I hadn’t until then understood their meaning. It sort of lifted and hovered.

“Step on the clutch,” Rourke said, “and put it into first.” With his help I guided the bar to first, where it nuzzled into a nook. There was no need to ask if I was in gear—nothing feels so right as an exact fit. “Come off slowly, as you press the accelerator.”

The car churned down and pulled forward, making me think of sled dogs. It seemed to want to go faster, farther. It was as if I was holding it back. He told me to hit the clutch again, and he drew down my hand, helping me pop it up into second, and next third.

We went to the ocean, to one of the private beaches in Napeague. It was where he wanted to go. Despite the mildness of the night, the deserted beach seemed inhospitable, practically haunted, like the ruins of a building following a raging fire. I didn’t feel well. I started to shiver.

“Still cold?” he asked, looking to the shore. There was a blanket in back that smelled of sweat and wilted grass, and when he wrapped it around me, sand from the morning trickled down.

He asked about my family.

I said I didn’t have one.

“You have a mother,” he said. “I’ve met her.”

Strange that he had, strange that he’d kept it to himself. Probably he’d met her with Kate. Maybe Kate had called her
Mom
, saying,
Harrison, this is my Mom
, and maybe Rourke shook my mother’s hand and told her what a great girl Kate was, all the while searching in my mother for traces of me.

“And a father too,” he added.

I didn’t know what he was getting at, but I was convinced of my parents’
irrelevance regardless. I thought of his house in Spring Lake, his apartment, those giant rhododendrons. And his chest, disfigured in a fight over his dead father. You didn’t need to know his parents to
feel
them; they were incorporated into the boy they’d raised. Whatever it was that had attracted him to me was the result of absence, not presence.

“It’s not what you might think,” I said, though it was too late, really, to speak of myself. “It’s like something else, like never having been heard.”

He laid his hand on my thigh, and for a moment we froze, immobilized by the insinuation of sex, by its promise to restore us to conditions of denial, to get us past the putrid business of relating. I focused on the dashboard.

Rourke withdrew his hand with excessive caution, as if from a house of cards, and he lifted my face—reverently, like a chalice. “Something,” he said, kissing me, “about you.”

His mouth, that mouth, nearing, advancing, seeking in vain to capture all that I did not have and could not give. His wrists joined beneath my chin, supporting my head. His thumbs pressed my cheeks.

“Do you know what I feel?”

I said yes, yes I did. I knew a kiss was not enough and sex was not enough and living with him was not enough. I knew the irony of having failed despite the extremes of our consummation, that it was not conceivable to reach the place we needed to go. Around his eyes were beautiful creases. His knuckle dug into my jawbone, forcing my head sideways, my ear to his lips.

“And you,” he said. “You would do anything.”

“Anything,” I said.

I began to cry. I thought to wipe my eyes, but I liked looking as I felt, a thing half-dead. He covered my mouth with his palm, and he waited, breathing, driving himself back. “Then I’ll ask for what you can’t give,” he said. “Nothing.”

The light from the moon off the ocean beat against the car like a stationary rain, bathing us in a pool of white, turning everything the color of bones. In such light I could see: I could see he was alive, extraordinarily alive, and I could see his will to persevere. I could see that he had abandoned that will when he’d met me, and that he needed to return to
it. I could see the hatred that followed from his need, the rage at his defeat in wanting me. It was the fiend he believed himself to be that expressed itself in the light.

We remained in the car until daybreak, and we had sex for so long that inside I hurt. I thought I understood. We had to go until there was no going back, until it was certain that we could not meet again without recalling the degradation of our final night, until all that we’d shared had turned irreclaimable. His eyes never stopped staring. They seemed to shed their own color, like casting off black. The wry malice in his face, the animosity, the challenge to his successor—could he see him? It seemed that he could see him. Rourke seemed to be leaving in me some message or a sign, changing me for good.

In the end, the car was moving, and I was receding, every second thinning more. Through my mouth, my breaths sounded like those of a felled animal. I could hear the hydraulic thunder of the engine, like a sound from some contiguous time, and the fizz of the wind through glass. I raised one hand to my window. My hand was heavy like lead reaching into the dead sunrise.

I dreamt I was hauling boxes through tides of sand. I was alone, and the terrain was rugged. I passed a figure suspended in the cliffs, red and robed and supported by string, warning me. Ahead of me was my destination, a camp—snakelike, ophidian, like a low, slinking train of lantern lights. From the camp I knew I could be seen walking alone. On the way, I met a woman. She was crying, and on her face were burnt braids.
These have not disappeared
, she said,
since coming to America. Disappeared
is a beautiful word, I thought—
appeared, dis-appeared
. I also met an eagle, decrepit and drooling. It said,
Your mother was luxurious and your father was luxurious
. I asked the eagle what I must be, and he said,
What you were meant to be
. The last part of the dream was about a figure, several figures melded to one. They lifted me; they pulled away; I levitated. There was an imposing wetness on my legs and around my neck. And hands, sure and soft, there but hardly there.

I felt for my head—my hand couldn’t find it; it hurt to think where it had gone. I did not move from my back. I could not. Slowly and by degrees,
questions formed in my mind, not many, only so many as my intellect could tolerate. I felt pressure in my pelvis. I wondered if I needed to pee.

“What happened?” I asked, or tried to ask.

A cup met my lips. “You had a fever,” he said.

My eyes, they opened, and my hand drifted up to stop the sunshine. Rourke raised my shoulders inches from the pillow and shifted me to face away from the window. Beneath the sheets I was naked.